On the evening of October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty- one
other men launched an attack on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers
Ferry,1 the beginning of a long-range plan to destroy
the slave system in the South. They were successful in capturing
the Arsenal, but soon lost their superior position, due partly to
circumstances which delayed the raiding party from leaving the
Arsenal and retreating into the mountains above Harpers Ferry. The
next day the group was surrounded by the Virginia militia, and on
Tuesday morning U. S. Marines, under the command of Colonel Robert
E. Lee, battered down the doors of the engine house in the Armory
yard and captured John Brown and his surviving comrades. In the
course of the raid ten of Brown's men were killed; seven, including
Brown himself, were captured and later hanged, and five escaped.
There is evidence also that several slaves and free Negroes from
the Harpers Ferry region participated in the raid; those who were
killed or captured were surreptitiously disposed of by the State of
Virginia, and those who escaped went quickly and quietly back to
their residences in order to avoid detection.2

In The Inner Civil War, George M. Fredrickson describes John
Brown as "a narrow-minded and possibly insane religious
fanatic."3 This dismissal of Brown as a lunatic or, at
best, a religious fanatic, is common among contemporary historians.
It is ironic that the Civil War, which cost 600,000 lives, is today
considered a "reasonable" or at least "understandable" event in our
history, but John Brown's raid is disregarded as the bloody act of
a "madman."4

In 1859, the raid at Harpers Ferry was taken much more
seriously, both by abolitionists and by the defenders of slavery.
Several prominent abolitionists aided Brown with money and weapons
in his preparations for Harpers Ferry and in his earlier fight in
"bleeding Kansas." Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were asked
to join the raiders, and Harriet Tubman agreed to participate but
was ill at the time of the raid. And, although the immediate
reaction to the raid was shock on the part of the less militant
abolitionists, many openly applauded the action and honored the
raiders before the year was out. The raid at Harpers Ferry was
influential in persuading Northern abolitionists that moral suasion
would not be sufficient to end the slave system and that more
direct action was necessary.

The South took Brown seriously, also. Under interrogation in
jail he answered questions with dignity and forthrightness, and
several of his captors expressed their respect for the lean,
bearded old man. The conduct of John Brown during his incarceration
and trial was so strong and unwavering that slavery went on trial
rather than slavery's captive. The South was deeply agitated by the
raid, especially by Brown's plan to draw slaves from Virginia into
the mountains to build a guerrilla force that would eventually
liberate all slaves. The slave system trembled in fear of slave
uprisings, especially after the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831.

In order to understand the raid as a serious and important
attempt to end slavery in North America, there are several
questions which need to be answered about the event and about its
organizer: What were the motives and the intent of John Brown's
raid at Harpers Ferry? What concrete abolitionist support did Brown
get for the raid? What were the affects of the raid on the North
and the South? If we discover clear evidence that Brown was a
rational and respected man who attempted a dangerous but feasible
action and made a significant contribution to ending slavery, then
we must ask one final question: Why do present-day historians so
frequently dismiss John Brown as a fanatic?

Attempts to disclose John Brown's motives and his total plan
began immediately after the raid. The Mason Committee, a
Congressional committee headed by Senator James M. Mason of
Virginia, conducted an official investigation in the months after
the raid. Later, several people who were in some way connected with
the raid wrote accounts which revealed some of the information that
would solve the mysteries surrounding the incident: James Redpath
wrote a biography of Brown in 1872; in 1891 Franklin Sanborn
collected the letters of John Brown; Richard Hinton wrote a
detailed account of the raid in 1894; and Oswald Garrison Villard
wrote a biography of Brown in 1910. In 1909, W. E. B. DuBois made
the first comprehensive study of John Brown, using the material of
all the previous Brown studies. Two very recent books about Brown,
one by Stephen Gates and one by Barrie Stavis, are the first
attempts to go beyond DuBois in describing exactly what happened
during the raid, and to uncover Brown's plans for guerrilla warfare
in the Allegheny Mountains.

The major sources for this paper are: Louis Ruchames' and
Franklin Sanborn's collections of John Brown letters; accounts of
the raid by Hinton, Redpath, and the testimony of the Mason
Committee of the 36th Congress; the DuBois study; the Provisional
Constitution of the raiding party; the books by abolitionists
involved in planning the raid—Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Franklin Sanborn, and Frederick Douglass; the books published in
1970 by Gates and Stavis; the manuscripts in the Executive Papers
of Henry A. Wise at the State of Virginia Library in Richmond; and
the John Brown Papers in the Library of Congress.

JOHN BROWN'S DEVELOPMENT AS AN ABOLITIONIST AND HIS ROLE IN
KANSAS

It must be admitted that John Brown was a "peculiar"
abolitionist. While other men and women, black and white, worked
feverishly for emancipation by speaking, writing, collecting
petitions, and assisting runaway slaves, John Brown felt an urgency
and a sense of personal responsibility which made him impatient
with moral suasion or political campaigns. The source of his
impatience can be traced back to his childhood and to his religious
experiences as a young man.

John Brown - variously known through his life as "Old Man
Brown," "Fighting Brown," "Captain Brown" and "Ossawatomie Brown" -
was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut, to Owen Brown
and Ruth Mills Brown.5 His mother died when John was
eight, which for a long time was a great heartache to him and made
him especially sensitive to the "motherless child." Gwen Brown, a
tanner of modest means, wrote in his Autobiography: "I am an
Abolitionist. I know we are not loved by man . . ." He operated a
station on the Underground Railroad, and passed his hatred of
slavery on to his children both by his activities on behalf of the
slave and by the religious atmosphere which prevailed in their
home.6 John Brown joined the Congregationalist Church in
Hudson, Ohio at age 16, and decided during that same time to become
a minister, though he was never able to fulfill that
goal.7 He had little formal education, but was an avid
reader of the Bible, which he firmly believed was divinely
inspired. He "possessed a most unusual memory of its entire
contents," and its teachings remained a guide to Brown all his
life.8

In 1857, a little more than two years before his execution, John
Brown wrote a biographical sketch of his youth and sent it to Harry
Stearns, the son of George Luther Stearns, a prominent abolitionist
who contributed funds for the Harpers Ferry raid. In the sketch
Brown recalled a boyhood experience which happened during the War
of 1812, when he was 12 years old and driving cattle to the army
for his father:

During the war with England a circumstance occurred that in the
end made him a most determined Abolitionist: & led him to
declare, or Swear: Eternal war with Slavery. He was staying for a
short time with a very gentlemanly landlord since a United States
Marshall who held a slave boy near his own age very active,
intelligent and good feeling; & to whom John was under
considerable obligation for numerous little acts of kindness. The
master made a great pet of John: brought him to table with his
first company; & friends; called their attention to every
little smart thing he said or did: & to the fact of his being
more than a hundred miles from home with a company of cattle along;
while the negro boy (who was fully if not more than his equal) was
badly clothed, poorly fed; & lodged in cold weather, &
beaten before his eyes with Iron Shovels or any other thing that
came first to hand. This brought John to reflect on the wretched,
hopeless condition, of Fatherless & Motherless slave children:
for such children have neither Fathers or Mothers to protect, &
provide for them. He sometimes would raise the question is God
their Father?9

John Brown's upbringing had prepared him to recognize the
injustice in the situation which he witnessed, but it is noteworthy
that he remarked that the Negro boy was "fully if not more than his
equal. . . ." In the North there was considerable anti-slavery
feeling during the nineteenth century, but race prejudice was
rampant, even among some abolitionists. In this respect, John Brown
was a remarkable person. Benjamin Quarles commented in Black
Abolitionists that: "Brown's relationships with Negroes had been
close, continuous, and on a peer basis, a pattern which no other
white reformer could boast."10 Frederick Douglass was
impressed from their first meeting by Brown's deeply personal
commitment to the slave's cause. He described Brown as a person
who, "though a white gentleman, is in sympathy a black man, and as
deeply interested in our cause as though his own soul had been
pierced with the iron of slavery."11 Brown exhibited a
racial egalitarianism that was rare. He shared his pew, his home,
and his dinner table with blacks. He was passionate in teaching his
children the evils of slavery, and included them in his crusade
against it.12 In 1834, Brown proposed to his family a
plan "to get at least one Negro boy or youth, and bring him up as
we do our own,"13 and sometime around 1839 he knelt in
prayer with a visiting black preacher and vowed "to make active war
upon slavery, and then implored the blessing of God upon "such an
undertaking. . . ."14 He urged his family to join
him.

Three observations emerge from a study of John Brown's early
life. The first is the depth of his antislavery feelings. He must
have conveyed these feelings to Frederick Douglass, for the
ex-slave recognized a kindred passion in Brown which ordinarily,
and for good reason, only blacks shared. Most white abolitionists
had never witnessed the slave system in action, and many were
comfortable middle-class people who, though of greatest sincerity,
found it difficult to consider even free Negroes their equals. John
Brown's approach was entirely different. He had somehow acquired
the ability to feel the pain of the slave family, and that pain was
unbearable to him. Secondly, Brown's fervent, fundamentalist belief
in God prepared him for his no-compromise position on slavery;
Brown's was an Old Testament God who was unequivocal in His
judgment of right and wrong. The more liberalized religious
philosophies had incorporated in their creeds the political and
economic processes of nineteenth-century America, which
unfortunately included slavery in its Constitution. Thirdly,
Brown's youthful encounter with slavery had left him with an
overwhelming impression of evil, and his own hardships were to
convince him that he, John Brown, had a duty beyond his own house
and family to destroy that evil!15

The year 1837 marked a turning point in John Brown's life. Prior
to that date he had been a successful businessman, running his own
tanning business and speculating in land near his home in Hudson,
Ohio. By this time he had been married twice and already had a
large family. His first wife, Dianthe Lusk Brown, had died in
childbirth, that tragically common fate of women in the nineteenth
century, and he had married Mary Ann Day in 1833. The depression of
1837 swept away the money which Brown was accumulating for a
massive antislavery enterprise. In 1842 he went into bankruptcy,
and in September of 1843 he lost four of his children within a
week, a heavy loss to a man who loved his family as much as Brown
did.16 These misfortunes led Brown to believe that he
could no longer postpone the task he had set before himself - the
destruction of slavery. He spent the years between 1842 and 1849
winding up his business affairs, settling his family in the Negro
community at North Elba, New York, and organizing in his own mind
an anti- slavery raid that would strike a significant blow against
the entire slave system.17 He briefly outlined his plan
for such a raid to Frederick Douglass in 184718 and in
1849, he studied military fortifications in Europe as he developed
his plans further. To suggest that the Harpers Ferry raid was an
impulsive, ill-planned, or suicidal endeavor is to ignore the
preparations which began ten and twelve years before the raid. John
Brown had two criteria for his life's work: (1) it must aim at
destroying the entire slave system, and (2) it must be successful.
Much thought and planning went into the raid, even as early as the
1840s.

In the meantime, two other anti-slavery projects involved
Brown's energies. In 1851, in response to the new Fugitive Slave
Law, Brown formed the United States League of Gileadites in
Springfield, Massachusetts. Forty-four black men and women pledged
to arm and defend themselves against slave catchers, and while
there is no evidence that any of them used their weapons, the
League was a clear expression of the aggressive attitude Brown had
toward slaveholders and was urging others to
adopt.19

In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was passed, allowing settlers
in those two territories to choose to enter the Union as slave or
free states. Proslavery settlers were rushing into Kansas to ensure
its status as a slave state, and Emigrant Aid Societies in New
England were sending free-soilers or free-staters to vote Kansas
into the Union as a free state. John Brown urged his sons to settle
in Kansas and make a contribution to abolitionism in that way, and
five of them migrated in October, 1854, with their meager
collective property. Their father declined the trip on the basis
that he had another antislavery commitment which he had to
pursue.20

Upon his arrival in Kansas, John, Jr., wrote home to his father,
describing the situation which he and his brothers found.
Proslavery men were moving steadily into the territory, armed and
determined to establish slavery there; an election on March 30,
1855, had resulted in a proslavery legislature after Missourians
forcibly took over the polls. Early in the spring and summer of
that year free-staters held their own convention, and refused to
obey the laws of the fraudulent legislature (actually two
free-state conventions were held, one of abolitionists, and one of
those who opposed the entry of any Negroes whatsoever in the
state). Missouri newspapers now urged those who had bolstered
slavery at the polls to return and 'aid in enforcing laws.' John,
Jr., asked his father to send arms and ammunition, if possible, so
that the free-staters could defend themselves against the
anticipated invasion.21

John Brown decided to go to Kansas himself. He felt that there
might be important possibilities for a showdown with slavery, and
he began contacting abolitionists to raise money for guns. He
attended an abolitionist convention in Syracuse, one of his few
encounters with the organized antislavery movement. He read the
letter from his son to the assemblage, and spoke in his usual fiery
manner about the need to defend freedom in Kansas. His request was
answered with a donation of $60., most of it from Gerrit
Smith.22

Brown's request for arms made a considerable impact on the
predominantly pacifist antislavery movement. Just as Frederick
Douglass had admitted Brown's influence on his own split with
Garrisonian nonresistance, other abolitionists who had formerly
advocated only peaceful means, now crossed the line and began
supporting the use of force. Gerrit Smith and Charles Steams
reversed themselves and came out strongly for the armed defense of
a free Kansas; Wendell Phillips donated money to a Kansas rifle
fund, his first contribution to non-peaceful tactics; and Thomas
Wentworth Higginson eventually went to Kansas to aid the free-
state forces.23

John Brown arrived in Kansas on October 6, 1855. He found no
organized defense; free-staters were still trying to resist the
proslavery laws by noncooperation. Border ruffians were crossing
over into Kansas regularly, burning free-state homes, terrorizing
and sometimes murdering settlers. Shortly after Brown's arrival,
2,000 Missourians burned and sacked Lawrence, the free-state
capital of Kansas. Brown had organized a band for the defense of
Lawrence, but arrived too late to prevent the burning. He was
distressed that the free-state people in the city had not taken up
arms against the Missourians; to him it epitomized the lack of
commitment to action which could throw Kansas into the arms of
slavery. Within three days of the Lawrence burning, Brown laid and
carried out plans for the Pottawatomie executions. He shocked the
entire country, but aroused free-staters to fight against
slavery.24

With a small troop of men, including four of his sons and his
son-in-law, Brown went into the "Dutch Henry" proslavery settlement
and oversaw the execution of five of the leaders of the raids on
free-staters. The men were cut down with swords to avoid arousing
the settlement with pistol shots, and the daring and bloodiness of
the act at first reviled the free-staters, but had the long-range
effect of getting them to organize armed defense of the
territory.25

Brown had two purposes in the Pottawatomie executions. The first
was to stop the raids by border ruffians. To accomplish this he
used what can only be called an act of terrorism. The quick,
deliberate execution of five men, in the dead of one night, was a
successful attempt to frighten other raiders with the unspoken
warning: "the same might happen to you one of these nights." The
"Dutch Henry" settlement was virtually evacuated after the
executions, and attacks on free-state settlers fell off sharply.
Brown wanted secondly to spur the free-staters to organize their
own defense, and in this purpose, also, he was successful. So
vicious was the ensuing fight between pro and antislavery bands
that the federal government was finally forced to intervene and
recognize the electoral wishes of the Kansas settlers.26
"The blow freed Kansas by plunging it into civil war, and
compelling men to fight for freedom which they had vainly hoped to
gain by political diplomacy."27

The Pottawatomie executions have been cited as an example of
John Brown's insanity, or at least his villainy. This accusation
arises from a contradictory value system which sees
"institutionalized violence" as legitimate and individual violence
as criminal. Brown executed five men in a military campaign against
slavery. The response is shock and he is called insane. But who
would ever claim that the men who held three million slaves in
bondage were insane? Yet wasn't slavery a systematized form of
violence with a questionable stamp of legality on it? The use of
violence in a moral or political cause of a minority has long been
considered unjustified by those who believe that a democratic
nation can resolve its problems fairly and non-violently. But this
was clearly not the case in Kansas in 1855.

A pattern developed during John Brown's campaign in Kansas which
is important as a precedent to the Harpers Ferry raid. We recognize
in John Brown's activities and in his own words that he had one
thing singularly on his mind: to end slavery, and by any means
necessary. But it is clear that for Brown those means must be
practical; they must promise a good chance of success. Brown's role
in Kansas proves that as a tactician he was clever and thorough and
that he had little of the martyr instinct to die for a cause. Brown
was a fighter, not a sufferer; he was willing to die and faced that
possibility repeatedly, but his primary goal was to destroy slavery
and not to make a symbolic stand against it with his own life.
Finally, we see the structure developing which would prevail at
Harpers Ferry. Brown organized a small group of people whom he
could trust, and worked with that unit in Kansas; many of this
group would accompany him to Harpers Ferry. Brown involved his
family, of course, since spiritually this was a family matter and
because practically he was sure of the trust and abilities of his
sons. Kansas was to be an important prelude to Harpers Ferry.

THE HARPERS FERRY RAID AND WHY IT FAILED

It is difficult to trace the origins of a conspiracy - and this
is what the preparations for Harpers Ferry were - because everyone
involved did his (or her) best to keep the information secret. Even
after the Harpers Ferry raid had failed and Brown had been tried
and executed, many people were reluctant to reveal their parts in
the project, for fear of prosecution. Gerrit Smith was defending
himself from allegations regarding the raid as late as 1864, when
the Civil War was nearly over and Emancipation
declared.28 But, in order to evaluate the significance
of the Harpers Ferry incidents, we must find out what Brown's plans
for the raid were. There were many misconceptions about the nature
of the attack on the Arsenal, some of which remain to this day. The
most serious distortion draws a picture of John Brown and his men
madly attempting to take on the entire United States Army in a
pitched battle. This is far from the truth of Brown's scheme.

All of Brown's biographers remain unclear as to when the Harpers
Ferry raid was first designed, but it seems certain that it was a
plan which grew gradually, over a long period of time. As early as
1846, Brown talked about a great plan to liberate large numbers of
slaves by deliberately expanding the Underground Railroad
traffic.29 Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in 1859 that
Brown had determined twenty years before that he would go into a
slave state and liberate a large number of slaves.30
Probably Higginson is mistaken about the time; in the late 1830s
Brown was already considering an antislavery action of some moment,
but his ideas were in the realm of adopting a Negro child or
starting a school for Negro youths in Virginia.31

Brown became familiar with the country around Harpers Ferry
while doing a surveying job in Virginia in 1840 for Oberlin
College. At that time he wanted to buy a portion of the Oberlin
lands, and had in mind a school for black children which he
imagined would become a seminal place for inspiring blacks to claim
their freedom. But Brown never got the land, perhaps because of the
financial problems which Oberlin College was facing at that
time.32

In 1847, Frederick Douglass visited Brown at his home in
Springfield, Ohio [should be Massachusetts], and he later recorded in The Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass the outline of an antislavery plan which Brown
confided to him. Brown's plan included no insurrection, but it did
involve creating an armed force which would act in the very heart
of the South. Brown told Douglass, who at that time subscribed to
nonresistance, that he was not adverse to shedding blood if that
was required to rid the land of slavery. Brown referred to the
Allegheny chain and described a band of about 25 men who would
establish themselves in the mountains and make periodic trips to
the plantations below to induce slaves to join the band, eventually
building their forces to three or four times original size. With
this larger group they would begin running off slaves in large
numbers, retaining the strongest to increase their fighting force,
and helping those who wanted to go North to get in touch with the
Underground Railroad. This plan is very similar to the finalized
plan which developed between 1857 and 1859, and it is quite
possible that, in recalling the conversation, Douglass included
elements of the raid itself, rather than of the original
conversation.33 Thomas Thomas, a free Negro who worked
for Brown in Springfield, told Franklin Sanborn of a conversation
with Brown in 1846 in which Brown suggested a scheme to liberate
slaves, but Thomas claimed that until 1851 Brown had been planning
to buy land as a slaveholder in the South, employing trusted black
men to play the role of his slaves, and using this ruse to agitate
among the real slaves.34

We see Brown moving gradually over a period of two decades from
an educational approach to slave liberation to a direct assault on
slavery. Brown called it "carrying the war into Africa," but
initially the plan to run slaves off southern plantations was an
indefinite idea. Brown was doing research for his plan all during
the 1840s and 1850s. While living in Springfield, from 1845 to
1849, he studied maps of the South, Underground Railroad routes,
and census tracts to discover where Negroes were living. In 1849 he
went to Europe on business and studied military fortifications in
England, France, and Germany. James Redpath claims that Brown
talked to English abolitionists about his plan and gained
considerable sympathy, but no help.35 Richard Realf, one
of Brown's Kansas Company, reported after the raid that Brown had
read all the books on insurrectionary warfare that he could lay his
hands on; that he had studied Toussaint L'Ouverture's liberation of
Haiti and the history of Jamaica.36 And, beginning with
his conversation with Douglass in 1847, Brown purposefully
solicited the support of black leaders in the planning and
execution of a massive antislavery undertaking.37

It was after fighting in Kansas, and after the Pottawatomie
executions, that Brown began specifically planning for Harpers
Ferry.38 After his first campaign in Kansas, Brown spent
several months of 1857 in the East, speaking and raising money for
the free-staters, and also making contacts and collecting money for
a slave campaign in the South. Brown's preparations for the raid
progressed rather disappointingly. He was having a great deal of
trouble raising funds, mainly because the country was in another
economic slump and very little money was available for any
purpose.39 In March of 1857, Brown met Hugh Forbes in
New York. Forbes was a Briton who had fought with Garibaldi in the
abortive Italian revolution of 1848. He expressed interest in
joining the Brown raid and declared the firmest of abolitionist
ideas. Forbes agreed to serve as drillmaster for the band, and to
provide a handbook of tactics to be entitled Manual of the
Patriotic Volunteer. Brown told Forbes to meet him in Iowa later
that year, and authorized a $600.00 advance on his salary which was
to be $150.00 a month.40 Captain Brown made another
arrangement for the raid at this time. While speaking and raising
money in Collinsville, Connecticut, he contracted with Charles
Blair to have 1,000 pikes made. This indicates that the logistics
of a major raid were firm enough in his mind for him to spend
$1,000 on weaponry at a time when he was very short of
money.41

Kansas was remarkably quiet when John Brown returned in the
summer of 1857, and on October 5, the free-staters won the election
which paved the way for Kansas to enter the Union as a free state.
The reaction of many of Brown's eastern supporters was to consider
the struggle ended; George Luther Stearns withdrew a commitment of
$7,000.00 which he had offered to Brown earlier.42 John
Brown realized that little money would be sent to him on the basis
of the campaign in Kansas, and he felt that he would have to reveal
at least some of his raid plans if he hoped to get the amount he
needed. In October he wrote to Franklin Sanborn, practically
begging for money. He offered a strong hint of a planned raid, and
told Sanborn about the pikes he had ordered.43 Sanborn
was Brown's most ardent eastern supporter, and Brown hoped that he
would persuade the others to contribute funds.44

At this point another problem was added to Brown's financial
difficulties. Forbes and Brown disagreed about the strategy of the
raid, though it is unclear what specific differences they had. Both
were strong-minded men who found it natural to think of themselves
in a leadership position. Forbes resented taking second place to
Brown in the campaign, for he envisioned himself another Garibaldi.
He returned to the East in November, after only two months in Iowa,
and he began stirring up trouble. Forbes wrote to several of
Brown's supporters, chastising them for not sending money (and thus
depriving Forbes of the salary he needed to feed his allegedly
starving family in Paris); and he criticized Brown's capabilities
and urged that he, Forbes, replace the old man. For more than a
year, Hugh Forbes wrote angry letters and made desperate
threats— exposing more and more of the planned raid in hopes
of his own gain.45

John Brown continued to prepare for the raid which he hoped to
execute in the spring of 1858. In November, 1857, Brown gathered
together nine men, many of them former members of his Kansas
company, at Tabor, Iowa.46 There they collected all the
guns and supplies that had been stored after the Kansas fighting,
and set out for Ohio where Brown wanted to set up a school to train
the band. In Kansas, Brown had told the men only that he planned
another action against proslavery forces, but when they reached
Iowa, he said specifically that their ultimate destination was
Virginia —with no mention of Harpers Ferry. It is not certain
that even he had definitely decided on the place at which the raid
would be launched. He hinted to his men that their mission would be
slave- running. Several of the recruits objected to going South;
they wanted to continue fighting in Kansas. But Brown was a very
persuasive person, and most of the men agreed to follow him to
Virginia.47

Because of bad weather and lack of money, the group didn't make
it to Ohio. They spent the winter at the Quaker community of
Springdale, Iowa, and in January Brown prepared to leave to raise
money and recruit members in the East. Before going he appointed
Aaron Stevens to drill the men and John Kagi to lead political
discussions. These were two of his most trusted companions, and
with Kagi Brown even discussed the feasibility of launching their
attack on slavery at Harpers Ferry. This is the first specific
mention of Harpers Ferry that is recorded, and Brown did not make
the intended location of the first strike of the raid known to
anyone else for some time to come.48

Brown left for Andover, Ohio, on January 15, to visit his eldest
son. John, Jr. was still upset over the arduous experiences he had
had in Kansas, but his father begged him to help with the large
expedition now being planned. Brown found it difficult to separate
his sons' goals from his own; and with some good reason, since they
were all staunch abolitionists like himself. But not all of them
had the stamina for the kind of total commitment that ran through
every vein of their father's body. Three times before Harpers Ferry
we find Brown arguing with one or more of his sons, urging them to
participate in his grand plan; three of his sons, Oliver, Watson,
and Owen, were with Brown in Virginia. John, Jr. would not actually
participate in the raid, but the old man did manage to persuade him
to act as an intelligence agent and recruiter, despite the fact
that he appeared to be in an agitated state of mind and not able to
fulfill the task with the necessary concentration.49

From his son's home, "Old Ossawatomie" went to Rochester and hid
for a month in Frederick Douglass' house, having discovered that a
Federal marshal was on his trail. While at Douglass' home, Brown
perfected his plan for the raid, drawing maps and sketches of
fortifications and maneuvers. He talked extensively about the raid
to Douglass, who promised to solicit aid from northern
blacks.50 Clearly, Brown felt that he was making final
preparations for the raid. He wrote each of his main financial
supporters - they came to be known as the "Secret Six," but at this
point they were not actual participants in the conspiracy - and
told John, Jr to make a slow trip through Pennsylvania, making
acquaintances at Bedford, Chambersburg, Gettysburg, and Uniontown.
These contacts would be used to get supplies into Virginia and to
get slaves out.51

In February and March of 1858, Brown met with the "Secret Six":
George L. Steams, Gerrit Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Theodore Parker, Franklin Sanborn, and Samuel Gridley Howe. Brown
told them in considerable detail, about his plan, but he didn't
mention Harpers Ferry.52 Brown also solicited the aid of
several prominent black abolitionists: Dr. J. N. Gloucester, J. W.
Loguen, William Still, and Henry Highland Garnet, among others. All
of these black men gave Brown encouragement, but no concrete
arrangements were made for cooperation.53 As John Brown
wound up his preparations, he returned to his North Elba home to
enlist the members of his family who had agreed to join
him.54

The next step for John Brown and his band was a secret
convention at Chatham, Ontario, where there was a large Negro
settlement. Blacks and whites at the convention adopted a
"Provisional Constitution," in preparation for the raid. Why did
Brown need a constitution to initiate a slave-running operation? In
order to answer this question, it is necessary to discuss the
nature of the raid plan itself. Historians disagree about what
Brown's plan actually was, and their differences are closely linked
to their own political evaluations of slavery, abolitionism, and
direct action. Because not all of the details of the raid plan have
been recorded, historians have had to piece together the fragmented
information which is available and construct a whole and logical
plan. In guiding this process of selection and construction,
several facts about Brown are pertinent: (1) He had fought several
successful battles in Kansas, so his skill and judgment as a
guerrilla fighter were proven. (2) He had spent twenty years of his
life developing an idea for the abolition of slavery, and the last
five, from 1854 on, had been concentrated specifically on
collecting information and devising a plan for a large- scale slave
raid. (3) Brown was a very religious man, but in the first half of
the nineteenth century this was not unusual, for religious revival
and enthusiasm continued during this period throughout the Eastern
and Southern states.55 This evidence, plus the
acknowledgement, which I believe to be a political value judgment,
that it was reasonable and understandable for someone to despise
slavery so much that he determined to see it ended at his own
initiative, leads to an understanding of the raid as an action
designed to succeed. It is only possible to view the Harpers Ferry
raid as an act of madness if one ignores the personal background of
John Brown and the potency of antislavery feeling among the more
militant abolitionists. It is important to remember that Theodore
Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson were using force of arms
against the Fugitive Slave Law in 1854, and that black abolitionist
David Walker had urged the violent destruction of slavery as early
as 1829.

John Brown's plan of action had two separate aspects. The attack
on Harpers Ferry was only the first part of the raid, and Brown had
three purposes in launching the campaign in this way. First, he
needed weapons, which were abundantly available at the Arsenal.
Second, he needed a way to alert slaves throughout the South that
an earnest attack on slavery had begun, so that they could be
prepared to join him when the time came. Third, he needed to alert
his Northern supporters that the campaign was under way, so they
could send men and supplies to him. Brown planned to stay in
Harpers Ferry just long enough to accomplish those three missions,
then he and his band would retreat into the mountains behind the
Arsenal.56

Once in the mountains, Brown planned to set up a camp with the
small group of men which he had with him. The best of them would be
sent down at night to plantations in the area to encourage slaves
to join them in the mountains. He needed black men or women for
this part of the plan, for he was well aware that slaves were
realistically suspicious of whites; only blacks would have any
success in persuading slaves to leave their masters and come to the
mountains to fight slavery. When the mountain band had recruited
sufficient numbers, Brown would begin branching out in smaller
groups, extending the camps southward along the Allegheny chain.
Naturally he would be able to loot more plantations of their
slaves, and at this point he would begin bringing slaves into the
mountains who would then continue on to Canada via the Underground
Railroad. Brown and his company would live on what they could
confiscate from the plantations and whatever could be supplied by
Northern and Southern supporters.

It is valuable to look back at the Missouri raid on December 20
and 21, 1858, as a prototype of what Brown had in mind for
Virginia. "Ossawatomie Brown" led a double column of men to the
homes of two Missouri planters, where several slaves were captured
and along with livestock and other confiscated property, taken to
Canada. One planter, who resisted the raiders, was killed by Aaron
Stevens against Brown's orders and desires. But there was no
massacre or attempt at pillage. So it was to be in the South.
Slaves would be removed from the plantations during the night, with
no bloodshed unless the planters made the mistake of resisting or
chasing the band.57

Once in the mountains, Brown's knowledge of guerrilla warfare
would be put to use. John Kagi showed Richard Hinton the plans
drawn by Brown for the mountain forts: "They were to be used in
ravines or 'draws' when so situated that passage from one to
another could be made. It was intended to conceal them by trees and
thickets, place them on hillsides, and otherwise arrange them as
ambuscades." The mountains would provide an inaccessible cover
where a small number of men could hold off a much larger
force.58

Some historians have imagined Brown collecting slaves into a
vast mountain settlement of black men and women, but Brown did not
envision this happening. He felt that the raids would have a more
profound affect on slavery than just the liberation of individual
slaves. The massive and consistent raids on plantations in one
county of Virginia would undermine the security of all slave
property in the state, causing planters to sell their slaves South.
Brown's band would follow, of course, and as slaves and raiders
moved further south, it would become increasingly clear to slave
owners that slave property was of little value, because it could
not be protected. This fact, and not a bloody confrontation, would
force slave owners to end slavery. There would be groups of
planters who would resist losing their slaves, and Brown was
willing to fight it out with them if necessary. But he would
clearly have the advantage in his mountain retreat against any
pursuing forces.59

For Brown there were advantages in his plan which justified his
enthusiasm for the raid. Brown believed, and there is considerable
evidence for it, that an explosive slave rebellion was inevitable.
Even if slaves could be restrained and such a rebellion subdued,
the prospects of civil war were in the air. Brown felt that
bloodshed over slavery was inevitable, and he was determined to
organize or coordinate a slave rebellion in such a way that the
killing was held to a minimum. His daughter, Ann Brown Adams, who
had been present with the raiders in Maryland up until a week
before the raid, told Richard Hinton of her father: "He expected. .
.that if they (the slaves) had intelligent white leaders that they
would be prevailed on to rise and secure their freedom without
revenging their wrongs, and with very little bloodshed. . .
."60

Brown wanted an "orderly" revolution, and he felt that this
would be possible through a guerrilla campaign. Brown's plan
involved maintaining a large number of men and women in the
mountains, some of them permanent members of the antislavery force,
others on their way to the North. Brown realized that this
transient mountain community could only survive and work together
if there were discipline and some form of government. This is what
was developed at the Chatham Convention. The "Provisional
Constitution" which emerged from the convention was a document with
48 articles, providing officers for the raiding party and guiding
its actions in the mountains. The document refutes any suggestion
that Brown was bloodthirsty. One of its main purposes was to avoid
unnecessary bloodshed and to maintain honorable conduct among all
the members of the mountain-dwelling group.61

What were the chances of success for the attack on slavery which
John Brown had engineered? Once we recognize that Brown was
planning an extensive guerrilla campaign, the wisdom of the
endeavor becomes more discernible. Two of the men who were intimate
with the raid plans testified to their soundness. Samuel Gridley
Howe, who had fought in Greece and was considered an expert on
guerrilla warfare, thought the scheme was a good one.62
James Redpath wrote after the raid: "Harpers Ferry, by the
admission of military men, was admirably chosen as the spot at
which to begin a war of liberation. The neighboring mountains. .
.would afford to guerrilla forces a protection the most favorable,
and a thousand opportunities for a desperate defense or rapid
retreats before overwhelming numbers of an enemy."63
DuBois, having studied in depth the circumstances of Brown's
action, agreed with this analysis: "In truth it need not have
failed. History and military science prove its essential
soundness."64

A study of the map of the area around Harpers Ferry shows the
substantial possibility of success, once John Brown got out of
Harpers Ferry. A hard climb of an hour or two would have taken
Brown and his men to safety in the foothills of the Alleghenies.
Another few hours and they would have been in the mountain
wilderness where caves, deep ravines and natural fortresses would
have allowed the men almost impenetrable cover. On the basis of
Brown's past experience in Kansas and his extensive knowledge of
guerrilla warfare, it is safe to say that he would have been able
to operate quite adeptly in this situation.65

Brown could have counted on aid from two probable sources of
support, once in the mountains. The first was among the slaves
living in the area under attack. There are several pieces of
information which indicate that slaves were ready to participate in
a coordinated assault on slavery. During the year before the raid,
Brown sent George B. Gill, one of his band, to visit a black man
named Mr. Reynolds. Reynolds told Gill of a military organization
of black men and women, with ramifications through most, or nearly
all, of the slave states. Reynolds had been through the South
himself, visiting and organizing. He told Gill of the many
references in Southern newspapers to this or that favorite slave
being killed or found dead, and claimed that these were slaves who
had been discovered as leaders of liberation plots. Reynolds said
the blacks were only waiting for Brown, or someone else, to make a
successful initiative move, then their forces would be put into
motion.66

There is evidence that several slaves from the Harpers Ferry
area did participate in the raid itself, but once it became certain
that failure awaited the enterprise, they returned hastily to their
plantations to escape discovery.67 DuBois feels that
more slaves would have been involved except for the fact that Brown
had to start the raid ahead of schedule because he feared exposure
of the plan.68 Other facts prove the support which
slaves were willing to offer at great risk. Several incendiary
fires broke out around Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid
which it seems certain were set by slaves and free
Negroes.69 DuBois confirms black participation in the
events around the raid by referring to Richard Hinton's estimate
that $10,000,000.00 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the
year 1859.70 Census figures substantiate the removal of
slaves from the Harpers Ferry region: Between 1850 and 1860 the
black population of Maryland and Virginia increased by about 4 per
cent. But in Loudoun and Jefferson counties in Virginia, and
Washington County in Maryland - the three counties surrounding
Harpers Ferry, there was a decrease of nearly 10 per cent in the
black population.71

Another important source of support for the raid was the white
mountain population of the region where Brown hoped to establish
his base. Barrie Stavis, in John Brown: The Sword and the Word has
added this analysis to the understanding of Brown's strategy. The
Southern mountain people, though white, had little else in common
with the wealthy plantation owners of the South. The two groups
were separated by class, and also by religious and ethnic
backgrounds. The mountain folk were, for the most part,
Scotch-Irish in descent, belonging to the Baptist, Methodist, and
Presbyterian denominations. The plantation owners, who were
predominantly Anglican, had used their great wealth to disinherit
their mountain counterparts economically and politically, and
referred to them derogatorily as hillbillies and
crackers.72

During the Civil War many poor mountain farmers disclosed their
political allegiance by opposing secession and remaining loyal to
the Union. Western Virginia separated from Virginia to form a Union
state, and the eastern portion of Tennessee tried unsuccessfully to
follow suit. The illiterate backwoodsman could see little in the
war to his benefit. Some mountaineers were distinctly out of
sympathy with the cause of slavery; others resented having to fight
for a cause which served the interests of the wealthy, many of whom
used their money to avoid the draft.73

In the mountains of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia,
Tennessee and Alabama, secret societies were established to agitate
for peace and a return to the Union. They not only discouraged men
from enlisting in the Confederate Army, but also encouraged
desertion; they opposed Confederate conscription laws and urged men
to join the Union Army.74 When the first conscript law
was passed. Southern unionists retreated to the mountains of
eastern Tennessee. The migration was well organized, and pilots led
the refugees to places of safety or to the Federal Army, if they
wished to fight.75

The mountain people were angered by the provision in the
conscript law which allowed a conscriptee to purchase a substitute
or provide 20 slaves in place of his service. The substitution
system disclosed to the masses of Southern people the power of
capital, and the inequities were all too clear:

They must go into the ranks while their neighbors who happened
to be blessed with money could hire substitutes; they must give
their blood while men of property must give only of their
possessions. The inequality produced gave much poignancy to the
slogan of the mountains: 'the rich man's war and the poor man's
fight.'76 It was estimated that by 1863 one-half of the
soldiers from the northeastern counties of Georgia were hiding in
the mountains. The Confederate War Office went so far as to declare
that: "The condition of things in the mountain districts of North
Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama menaces the existence
of the Confederacy as fatally as either of the armies of the United
States."77 This was precisely the area in which Brown
intended to operate, and his hopes of winning the mountain people
over to his side are reflected in several articles of the
"Provisional Constitution" which deal specifically with the
relationship between the antislavery bands and the nonslaveholding
Southern population.78 Brown expected mountain people
would assist him by scouting, tending the sick and wounded,
providing food, and concealing the presence of his forces; and he
also hoped that some would join his army. It appears that those
hopes were firmly based.79

Brown's plan was well-designed and his chances of success seemed
good. Why, then, did the raid fail? Several specific problems arose
after the Chatham Convention which disrupted the schedule and
proceedings which Brown had organized. Richard Realf revealed to
the Mason Committee that Brown had originally planned to begin the
raid in June of 1858.80 One of the circumstances which
prevented that was Hugh Forbes' activities in the East after he
left Brown in Iowa in the fall of 1857. Forbes wrote to several
abolitionists, complaining about Brown and revealing the most
confidential details of the raid quite
indiscriminately.81 Theodore Parker and Samuel Gridley
Howe were appalled that this information was being extended in an
unknown number of letters and verbal tirades, and they insisted
that Brown call the raid off temporarily. Thomas Higginson and John
Brown both wanted to take the risk of continuing with the original
plans, hoping that Forbes hadn't done any real damage. Brown told
Higginson that postponement would be difficult and hindersome:

he. . .considered delay very discouraging to his thirteen men,
and to those in Canada. . . .The knowledge that Forbes could give
of his plan would be injurious for he wished his opponents to
underrate him; but still. . .the increased terror produced would
perhaps counterbalance this. . . .If he had the means he would not
lose a day. He complained that some of his Eastern friends were not
men of action. . .that they magnified the obstacles. Still, it was
essential that they should not think him reckless, he said; and as
they held the purse, he was powerless without them. . .
82

There was nothing for Brown to do but conceal the arms he had
collected, scatter the men who had gathered at Chatham, and hide
out in Kansas until the Forbes incident was forgotten. DuBois says:
"It was a bitter necessity and it undoubtedly helped ruin the
success of the foray. The Negroes in Canada fell away from the plan
when it did not materialize and doubted Brown's determination and
wisdom."83

Another reason the raid was delayed was lack of funds. Brown had
great difficulty raising the money he needed, and he became
irritated at what he considered a lack of commitment on the part of
his Eastern abolitionist friends.84 Finally, in August
of 1859, although he still didn't have as much money as he felt he
needed, Brown began moving his company to the Harpers Ferry area.
He rented the Kennedy farmhouse about five miles outside the town
in Maryland, pretending to be a farmer. He got his 15-year-old
daughter, Ann, and his 17-year-old daughter-in-law, Martha, to stay
at the farm to give the scene a more familial look to the
neighbors. The raiders who stayed there hid in the loft of the
house most of the time, coming out only at night to stretch their
legs and get some fresh air.85

It was not until this point that Brown announced to the other
men his intention to attack the Harpers Ferry Arsenal as a way of
getting more guns and as a dramatic incident to announce the
commencement of the antislavery campaign. "Even his own sons did
not regard it as a wise or practicable step."86 A warm
discussion of the idea ensued, and one of the band, Charles Tidd,
was so angry that he left the farm for a while to cool off. Brown
offered to resign as leader of the group, but the other men
insisted that they needed his guidance. Charles Tidd, in an
interview with Higginson on February 10, 1860, said: "Finally when
they consented, it was with the agreement that men would be sent in
each direction to burn bridges."87 This, however, was
not done. Tidd was one of the five men who escaped after the raid,
and he told Higginson that he still endorsed Brown's general
project and felt it could have been a success. But Tidd considered
the attack on Harpers Ferry too risky, and believed it never should
have been attempted.

Throughout the fall Brown had been planning to initiate the raid
on October 24, but by the second week in October he was worried
about the suspicions of neighbors. A woman who lived near by had
walked into the house when all of the men were down from the loft
eating dinner, and everyone knew that she was curious about what
was going on and thought that they were running slaves, since
several of the men in the house were black. So, on October 15,
Brown announced that they would strike the next evening. The men in
the house were prepared to move, in fact they were quite restless,
but several of the band hadn't arrived yet. Also, the slaves in the
area were anticipating the raid later in the month, and were caught
off guard when it happened on the 16th.88

Once the raid began, two tactical errors were made which may
have been the cause of the defeat. On the morning of the 17th, a
Baltimore and Ohio train came through Harpers Ferry and was stopped
by some of Brown's men. Brown insisted that the train be allowed to
go through; he expressed his concern about the passengers and the
friends and relatives that were awaiting them. But, when the train
reached Baltimore, the occupants naturally informed the authorities
about what seemed to be going on at Harpers Ferry, and this led
eventually to the Marines being sent from Washington,
D.C.89

Another problem arose when Charles Tidd and Osborne Anderson
didn't return to the town with the wagon full of guns from the
Kennedy farmhouse. It is not quite clear what detained them, but by
the time they got back to Harpers Ferry, the other men were
surrounded in the fire engine house, and there was no way to save
the expedition. Several of the raiders had urged Brown to leave the
town and to retreat into the mountains while there was still time.
But Brown insisted on waiting for the weapons from the farmhouse,
and by then he was unable to move. DuBois thinks that it is
possible that Tidd dallied on purpose, since he disapproved of
Brown's plan.90

Twice Brown tried to exchange the several hostages he had
collected for the freedom of the raiders, but his offer wasn't
accepted. Finally, on Tuesday morning, October 18, the U.S. Marines
broke down the door to the engine house, and one of the officers,
Lieutenant Green, beat Brown to the ground, senseless.91
The military campaign ended there, in defeat, with ten of the
raiders dead. But a new campaign began. John Brown's sword was
broken, but the words he spoke so fearlessly in the weeks to come
proved even stronger. Brown won the respect of his enemies because
of "the manner chiefly in which he has acted since his capture, and
during his trial," one opponent of the raid wrote. "History does
not contain a parallel for such noble, chivalric, heroic yet modest
learning."92 The story of the Harpers Ferry raid was the
first major event to be carried across the nation by telegraph
wires; soon the whole world knew that a war against slavery had
begun. The affect was profound and spelled, in many ways, the
beginning of the end for the South's "peculiar institution."

ABOLITIONIST SUPPORT FOR THE HARPERS FERRY RAID

In seeking evidence that John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry was
a reasonable plan of action, it is important to consider the
support that Brown had from respected and well-known abolitionists,
both black and white. Brown had never been very involved in the
organized abolitionist movement.93 Herbert Aptheker says
that there is some evidence that Brown contributed to the printing
of David Walker's Appeal, and he attended some antislavery
meetings, but his contact with the abolitionist movement was
limited and sporadic.94 However, he had many contacts
with individual abolitionists, and actively sought their aid for
both Kansas and Harpers Ferry. The degree of support he got for
such militant action is significant. There were many people who
didn't think that John Brown was the least bit insane, and they
were willing to put their money and other resources behind his
efforts.

The prominent black figures who were sought out by Brown
included Martin R. Delany, Jermain W. Loguen, Henry Highland
Garnet, William Still, and Charles H. Langston.95 Brown
contacted Jermain Loguen in February of 1858, and Loguen
wholeheartedly supported Brown's plot and agreed to recruit blacks
in his area "who would go to war." Dr. and Mrs. J. N. Glouchester
of New York also talked with Brown that month, and pledged to do
all they could to organize the support of New York's 15,000 blacks
behind Brown's efforts.96 At this time Brown was
expecting to initiate the raid in the spring of that year, but the
long delay made it impossible for him to give the Glouchesters and
Loguen any more of the details they needed to recruit blacks for
the raid.

Martin R. Delany helped Brown set up the Chatham Convention and
served as its chairman. The convention included 34 Negroes, most of
them from Ontario's population, which Delany and Loguen had
recruited. Many of the blacks from Canada signed up to join Brown
in Virginia, but, once, again, the delay meant that Brown lost
contact with most of these men, and only Osborne Anderson
represented the Canadian blacks at Harpers Ferry.97

The black person that Brown probably felt closest to was
Frederick Douglass. Brown had great admiration for Douglass, and he
confided more information about the raid to him than to anyone
else. Douglass' attitude toward Brown seems ambiguous. Brown had
influenced Douglass' move away from nonviolent abolitionism, but
when Brown was hiding in Douglass' house in 1858, the ex-slave said
he found Brown's constant discussion of the planned raid "boring."
Brown very much wanted Douglass to be involved in the Harpers Ferry
raid, and the two met in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on August
19-21, 1859, where Brown told Douglass that he planned to take the
Arsenal. Douglass was dismayed, and urged Brown not to walk into "a
perfect steel-trap." Brown insisted that Harpers Ferry could be
captured, and begged Douglass to join him. "Come with me,
Douglass," he pleaded; "I will defend you with my life. I want you
for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm,
and I shall want you to help hive them." Douglass refused to go,
but Shields Green, a runaway slave who was with Douglass, decided
to join the raiders.98

After the raid, Douglass felt he had to flee the country,
because the South was anxious to implicate him in the incident and
hang him with the others.99 While in jail, Brown
expressed to Judge and Mrs. Thomas B. Russell, abolitionists from
Boston, some bitter feelings toward Douglass for not participating
in the raid.100 While each of these men had a deep
hatred of slavery, and both were totally committed to its
abolition, they saw their roles in different ways, and each was
determined to pursue what he felt to be most
important.101

Harriet Tubman was to have joined the raid, but illness
prevented her from getting to Harpers Ferry. The five black men who
did participate in the raid - John A. Copeland, Osbome P. Anderson,
Shields Green, Lewis Leary, and Dangerfield Newby—were ample
proof that blacks did support the raid and were willing to fight
beside Brown.102

Many white abolitionists aided Brown in various ways, also. The
most important of these was the group of men who came to be known
as the "Secret Six." They are considered Brown's main financial
backers for the Harpers Ferry raid, and the group included some of
New England's foremost abolitionists. Gerrit Smith was a member of
Congress from New York, a millionaire and a philanthropist; he had
donated a large tract of land for Negro settlement, which also
enabled blacks to vote as property owners. Theodore Parker was a
Unitarian minister, an orator, master of 20 languages, and the
owner of a library of 16,000 volumes; he had played a prominent
role in Boston in resisting the Fugitive Slave Law, hiding fugitive
slaves in his house and encouraging them to defend themselves with
guns. Franklin B. Sanborn was an educator and a teacher, and after
the raid he wrote an important biography of Brown, The Life and
Letters of John Brown. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe was a physician
who had fought with Garibaldi; he founded the Massachusetts School
for the Blind and was the co-editor of an abolitionist newspaper
along with his wife, Julia Ward Howe. George Luther Steams was a
wealthy merchant and philanthropist. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was
a Unitarian minister from Worcester, Massachusetts, who had joined
Parker in the struggle against the capture of fugitive slaves in
the Boston area; he went to Kansas in 1856 to evaluate the
situation of the free- state forces and to see what kind of aid
they needed. Higginson implied, in Cheerful Yesterdays, that
he would have gone to Harpers Ferry with Brown if the raid hadn't
been delayed.103

Higginson and Sanborn were the leading figures in the "Secret
Six," and Brown relied heavily on them to keep the other men
interested in the project and to solicit funds from them. In March
of 1858, two months before the Chatham Convention, after repeated
consultation with Brown and with each other, the men decided to
work together as a secret committee to advise Brown and raise
$1,000 for him. By May of 1858, however, the group had raised more
than $4,000.00, money that was used to sustain Brown's group
through the long delay from the spring of 1858 to the summer of
1859. None of the "Secret Six" knew where Brown intended to strike;
they had asked him not to implicate them with that information, in
case something went wrong with the raid. After Brown's capture,
several of these men were accused of aiding him, and the Southern
authorities were anxious to prosecute them for their involvement
with Brown. Samuel Howe and George Steams were called before the
Mason Committee which investigated the raid, though no concrete
evidence could be charged against them. Andrew Hunter, the
prosecuting attorney in the Harpers Ferry case, wanted at least one
of the raiders tried in Federal court so that he could summon
certain Northern abolitionists and prove their complicity, but this
was never done.104

Other well-known abolitionists supported Brown in various ways,
also. Lydia Maria Childs, the abolitionist author, wrote to Brown
in jail and offered to care for his wounds; he wrote back that she
could be of more service to him by aiding his family.105
John Quincy Adams wrote to Governor Wise of Virginia, castigating
him for participating in the scheduled hanging of Brown: "Can you
sit as the chief magistrate of that once patriotic state, bow
yourself before this Moloch, while the blood of liberty is dropping
from the Declaration of Independence as it is borne aloft in the
talons of the American Eagle." Amos A. Lawrence, a well-known
Boston lawyer, wrote to Wise twice, urging him to give Brown a fair
trial.106

Henry D. Thoreau had known and admired John Brown before the
raid, and had contributed some money to him, but he knew nothing of
the plans for Harpers Ferry. When news of the raid reached Concord,
Thoreau immediately wrote a eulogy of Brown called "A Plea for
Captain John Brown." He read the eloquent speech in Concord and
Boston, although he faced considerable opposition, even from other
abolitionists. Thoreau was the first person to make a public
statement praising the raid as a meritorious act, calling it "the
best news America has ever had." For the rest of his life he
considered Brown a true Transcendentalist, a man who followed the
voice within him even though it led him into battle with the
state.107

Ralph Waldo Emerson shared Thoreau's enthusiasm for the raid,
for many of the same reasons. He wrote that "John Brown was an
idealist. He believed in his ideas to that extent that he existed
to put them all into action."108 William Lloyd Garrison,
editor of the Liberator, initially referred to the raid as the
"well-intended but sadly misguided effort of Captain John Brown."
But even Garrison, a dedicated pacifist, endorsed the raid in a
speech at Tremont Temple in Boston on the day of Brown's execution.
Garrison pointed out that he was a nonresistant who had labored for
over twenty-eight years to bring about the peaceful abolition of
slavery. "Yet, as a peace man - I am prepared to say: 'Success to
every slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.'
And I do not see how I compromise or stain my peace profession in
making that declaration. . . .Rather than see men wearing their
chains in a cowardly and servile spirit, I would, as an advocate of
peace, much rather see them breaking the head of the tyrant with
their chains. Give me, as a nonresistant. Bunker Hill and
Lexington, and Concord, rather than the cowardice and servility of
a Southern slave-plantation."109

Wendell Phillips was one of the most influential of the
abolitionist speakers in 1859, and after the raid he gave a speech
in Henry Ward Beecher's church in Brooklyn on "The Lesson of the
Hour." Phillips also recognized the importance of what John Brown
had done and eloquently portrayed it to his audience:

Harper's Ferry is the Lexington of today. . . .Suppose
he did fail. . . .There are two kinds of defeat. Whether in chains
or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call
Bunker Hill a defeat; but Liberty dates from it, though Warren lay
dead on the field. . . .Virginia did not tremble at an old
gray-headed man at Harper's Ferry; they trembled at a John Brown in
every man's own conscience. . . .Insurrection was a harsh, horrid
word to millions a month ago. John Brown went a whole generation
beyond it, claiming the right for the white man to help the slave
to freedom by arms.110

Support for John Brown grew while he was in jail. Brown received
letters from all over the country, offering encouragement, sending
money, and praising the old man for his courage. One man even
offered to hang in Brown's place. Letters poured in to Governor
Wise, asking that Brown be pardoned or that he not be hanged. There
were even indications that there was some white Southern support
for Brown. Wise also received letters threatening his life,
promising that he would be killed as the South "burned down," if
Brown were executed. Many people wanted to see Brown rescued, and
at least one rescue attempt was planned, but John Brown felt that
he could do more good for the antislavery cause by hanging, so he
discouraged any attempt at freeing him.111

Many people expressed their hatred of Brown also, during the
time he spent in jail. But the point to be made here is that
thousands of Brown's contemporaries took him and his action
seriously. There were charges of insanity directed at him, and
letters were sent to Wise urging him to grant Brown clemency on the
grounds of insanity. But these were from people who did not feel a
deep commitment to ending slavery. One man who had known Brown for
some time wrote, "very soon he began to talk with great earnestness
of the evil of slavery on which he very soon became enthusiastic
and claimed that any course, whether stealing or coaxing niggers to
run away from their masters was honorable." The use of the term
"nigger" disqualifies that man from any judgment of Browns sanity,
since his own political values were so different.112
None of the abolitionists charged Brown with being crazy, because
all of them could understand the political perspective of the raid.
Once the basic principle of the necessity of abolishing slavery was
agreed upon, it became impossible to dismiss Brown simply as a
madman. For, as Garrison, the greatest pacifist of them all, was
willing to admit, history had proven moral suasion to be in-
sufficient, and violence became the justifiable last resort for men
and women who could not accept the continued existence of slavery
in the United States.

It should also be remembered, in evaluating Brown's support for
the raid, that twenty-one other men joined him at Harpers Ferry.
Their participation in the raid also justifies to the convincing
nature of Brown's plan.

Osbom Perry Anderson was a free-born Pennsylvania Negro who met
Brown in Canada. He was 24 years old and a printer by trade.
Anderson escaped from Harpers Ferry and, eluding capture, he wrote
an account of the raid, and later fought in the Civil War. Shields
Green was an escaped slave from South Carolina who was known as
"Emperor." He was about 24 years old and a friend of Frederick
Douglass. Green was captured in the engine house and executed in
1860. John A. Copeland was a 22-year-old black man, a carpenter by
trade, who had been born of free Negro parents in North Carolina,
reared in Oberlin and educated at Oberlin College. He was captured
trying to escape across the Shenandoah, and almost lynched. Saved
from lynching, he was executed in 1860. Dangerfield Newby was 30
years old, a free Negro from the Harpers Ferry area. He had a wife
and seven children in slavery, and he participated in the raid
partly in hopes of freeing his family. Lewis Sherrard Leary was a
former slave from North Carolina, and the uncle of John Copeland.
Leary was killed trying to escape across the Shenandoah.

Five members of Brown's family joined the raid, three sons and
two brothers of his eldest daughter's husband, William and Dauphin
Thompson. Oliver Brown was 20 years old and had just been married.
He was shot and killed in the engine house on Monday night. Watson
Brown, 25, was shot as he left the engine house under a flag of
truce to investigate what had happened to William Thompson. The
Thompsons were neighbors of the Browns' in North Elba, and the two
families were very close. William Thompson, 26, was captured when
he left the engine house under a flag of truce. After another
raider shot and killed Mayor Beckham, an infuriated mob dragged
William from the Wager House down to the river and murdered him.
His brother, Dauphin, was killed by the Marines during the assault
on the engine house.

Several of the raiders had come from Kansas. Stewart Taylor, who
was about 21, was killed as he fought from the engine house.
Jeremiah Anderson, 26, from Indiana, had fought with a guerrilla
company in Kansas and met Brown there. Some question has been
raised as to his race; DuBois claims that he was black. He was
killed during the assault on the engine house, run through with a
Marine bayonet. William H. Leeman was 20 years old, one of the two
youngest members of the party, and he had also been in the Kansas
fighting. Leeman tried to escape across the Potomac River on
Monday, but was caught and shot at point-blank range. Albert
Hazlett, in his 20's, was another member of the Kansas band. He
escaped across the Potomac in a small boat, but was caught in
Pennsylvania, returned to Virginia, and executed in 1860.

Four men played especially important parts in the raid. John
Henry Kagi, 24, was Secretary of War in Brown's provisional
government. He had a good English education and had been a
newspaper reporter in Kansas, where he earnestly tried to help the
free-state cause. He was killed as he tried to escape across the
Shenandoah River from Hall's Rifle Works. John E. Cook, 29, an
adventurer from Connecticut, had lived and married in Harpers
Ferry, was Brown's advance man or spy. He was sent from the town
back to the farmhouse to help with the arms. After the raid, he
tried to escape through Pennsylvania, but was captured, and tried
and executed in 1860. Aaron Stevens, discharged from the U. S. Army
after beating up an officer in Mexico, gained extensive experience
in guerrilla warfare in Kansas where he fought under the name of
Colonel Whipple. Twenty-eight at the time of the raid, he was badly
wounded under a flag of truce, but survived to stand trial and was
executed in 1860. Charles P. Tidd, 27, who had fought in Kansas,
returned to the Maryland side of the Potomac to get guns from the
farmhouse, and failed to get back to Harpers Ferry. His failure to
complete his mission has been cited as one reason for the failure
of the raid.

Two brothers, Edwin and Barclay Coppoc, both in their 20's, were
Iowa Quakers who had joined Brown's group in Springdale. Edwin was
captured in the engine house and executed in 1860; but his brother,
Barclay, was stationed at the farmhouse as a rearguard and managed
to escape. Finally, there was Francis Jackson Merriam, the grandson
of Francis Jackson, the aristocratic Boston abolitionist, who had
joined the raiders just a few days before the attack, and who had
brought his $600.00 inheritance with him. He was assigned to the
farmhouse, and was never captured.113

THE EFFECTS OF THE HARPERS FERRY RAID ON THE NORTH AND THE
SOUTH

The importance of the Harpers Ferry raid went far beyond the
occurrences of October 16, 17, and 18. Wendell Phillips expressed
what he felt to be the long-range affect of John Brown's
action:

He has abolished slavery in Virginia. History will date
Virginia Emancipation from Harper's Ferry. True, the slave is still
there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks
green for months, - a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree.
John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only
breathes, - it does not live, -
hereafter.114

There was a tremendous response throughout the North to John
Brown's execution. Abolitionists, along with liberal and moderate
Northerners, who didn't like slavery anyway, were so impressed with
the courage with which Brown faced his trial, and by the eloquence
of his letters and interviews from jail, that they were deeply
disturbed at his execution. They gathered together in cities and
towns to pay tribute to the man and to condemn the South for
hanging him. Church bells were tolled from New England to Kansas.
Town officials in Albany, New York, fired a 100-gun salute. In
Hudson and virtually all the other towns in Ohio's Western Reserve,
hundreds of people crowded into their churches for commemorative
services. Banks, businesses, and public offices were closed all day
in Akron. At Cleveland, 1,400 people held a memorial meeting.
Public prayer meetings were held in Philadelphia, New York City,
Syracuse, Rochester, Fitchburg, Plymouth, New Bedford, and
Manchester. In many places blacks held their own memorial services
for John Brown. In Boston, all Negro businesses were closed, three
prayer meetings were held, and blacks wore black arm bands on
December 2, the day Brown was hanged. New York Negroes met at the
Shiloh Church for their commemoration. In Philadelphia, Negroes
closed their businesses and held two public prayer meetings. Blacks
in Pittsburgh and Detroit also held ceremonies, eulogizing their
dead friend. Funds were sent across the country for John Brown's
family, and for the families of some of the other raiders. And
finally, in the weeks that followed the execution, Northern
writers, poets and intellectuals enshrined Brown in an almost
endless procession of poems, songs, essays, letters, and public
addresses.115

The raid, trial and execution served to awaken the conscience of
much of the nation. At first, people were appalled at the
lawlessness of Brown's attempt. They saw him as a murderer and
condemned him. But, throughout the trial, Brown's firm reiteration
of his purpose made an impression on the watching nation. "Wider
and wider circles were beginning dimly and more clearly to
recognize that his lawlessness was in obedience to the highest call
of self-sacrifice for the welfare of his fellowmen. They began to
ask themselves, "What is this cause that can inspire such
devotion?"116 John Brown became the most powerful
abolition argument yet offered. People got the sense that the issue
could not be avoided much longer, and they felt forced to choose
the side that felt most comfortable to their own consciences - for
many that meant beside John Brown, in feeling if not in action.
Brown's supporters in Cleveland passed a resolution which precisely
expressed this change in attitude:

The irrepressible conflict is upon us, and it will never end
until Freedom or slavery go to the wall. In such a contest and
under such dire necessity we may 'without fear and without
reproach' let freedom stand and the Union be
dissolved.117

The Harpers Ferry raid seriously affected the future direction
of the abolitionist movement. Once it had been dominated by strong
pacifist politics, but after October of 1859, anger and
determination fused into a new position of militancy which demanded
the end to slavery, by any means necessary - and violence was felt
by many to be one of the necessities. Frederick Douglass wrote in
the November, 1859, issue of the Liberator:

[Brown] has attacked slavery with the weapons precisely adapted
to bring it to the death. Moral considerations have long since been
exhausted upon Slaveholders. It is in vain to reason with them. One
might as well hunt bears with ethics and political economy for
weapons, as to seek to "pluck the spoiled out of the hand of the
oppressor" by mere force of moral law. Slavery is a system of brute
force. It shields itself behind might, rather than right. It must
be met with its own weapons.118

Many abolitionist had abandoned their commitments to peaceful
means, and some seemed almost to look forward to a confrontation
which appeared more and more unavoidable. Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow wrote in his journal on December 2, 1859: "This will be
a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution, - quite
as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write, they are
leading Old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to
rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which
will come soon."119

Even Moncure Conway, an abolitionist who had left his Southern
home because of his convictions, finally, after much agonizing,
joined in praising Brown as a martyr, even though he realized that
the South's firm commitment to slavery could well lead to
fratricidal war.120 Charles H. Langston, a black
abolitionist, issued a statement denying that he had a hand in the
Harpers Ferry raid. But he went on to express his solidarity with
the attempt at slave liberation: "But what shall I deny? I cannot
deny that I feel the very deepest sympathy with the immortal John
Brown in his heroic and daring effort to free the slaves." This
sentiment, according to Benjamin Quarles, in Black Abolitionists,
"mirrored the reaction of the overwhelming majority of black
Americans."121

Few abolitionists had any enthusiasm about arguing for
non-resistance and moral suasion after John Brown was hanged. They
seemed to agree with "Old Ossawatomie" himself, and the statement
he handed to a guard on his way to the gallows: "I, John Brown am
now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never
be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly
flattered myself that without much bloodshed; it might be
done."122

John Brown left a deep mark on the South as well as the North.
The great Southern fear of a slave uprising was exacerbated by
Brown's attempt at Harpers Ferry. After the raid, Governor Henry A.
Wise of Virginia received several letters and telegrams claiming
that bands of men were invading the South. Suspicious people were
jailed or run out of town, books critical of the South were
publicly burned, and the whole region was in a state of alarm.
Planters in South Carolina wrote to Wise asking to be sent samples
of the pikes Brown had intended to give to slaves; they wanted
desperately to know a little about this shadowy
enemy.123 Another South Carolinian wanted to know what
contacts Brown had in that state, for antislavery agents were
suspected everywhere.124 Incendiary fires after the raid
had Southerners especially worried, as they were linked with a much
larger slave rebellion. One of the many telegrams Wise received
during this time said: "A gentleman just from Charlestown reports
that Mr. Sherley was burnt out last night, and it is reported that
100 men crossed the Shenandoah river." The next day another
telegram came: "The majority think the recent fires made by
Negroes. . . ."125 The Chicago Tribune properly
identified the fear that Southerners were feeling toward
"foreigners" and toward their own slaves:

Belshazzar's knees did not tremble more, when the hand of
Providence wrote his doom upon the inner wall of his palace, than
do these "chivalrous Virginians," whose imagination conjure up
millions of Browns and Smiths. . . .126

The Southern authorities, and especially Henry Wise and Andrew
Hunter, the prosecuting state's attorney, tried to do two
contradictory things in the face of the Harpers Ferry raid. On the
one hand they tried to minimize the importance of the raid, stating
that no slave support was offered Brown because slaves were loyal
to their masters. But, on the other hand, they were incredibly
anxious to get rid of Brown because of the real threat that he
posed as a rallying point for both Northern abolitionists and
Southern slaves. Andrew Hunter wrote to Wise: "The judge is for
observing all the judicial decencies, so am I, but at double quick
time."127 Hunter wanted the appearance of a fair trial,
but he also wanted Brown hanged as soon as possible, before the old
man inspired some other action against the South. Brown's
execution, on December 2, came less than seven weeks after his
capture. All the raiders who were caught were eventually hanged, at
a total expense of $250,000 to the State of Virginia. Between one
and three thousand troops were stationed in the Harpers Ferry area
for months after the raid, and militias all over the South were on
alert. Wise offered a $500 reward for the four known fugitives,
Tidd, Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Merriam. Clearly the raid
presented a formidable threat to Virginia and to the
South.128

Wise and Hunter also feared that Brown would be rescued from the
Charlestown jail where he was being held. Several threats were sent
to Wise promising that Brown would be released. The mayor of
Detroit reported that 30 men were leaving that city on their way to
rescue Brown, and from Kansas came a telegram:

"Organized parties have secretly left Kansas supposed
destination Virginia. Jim Lane understood head of Movement, think
they design Brown's rescue." Brown was held under heavy guard all
during his incarceration. The day of his hanging Charlestown was
filled with troops, and no strangers were allowed into the city;
women and children were urged to stay at home, for fear that an
attempt would be made to rescue Brown at the last
moment.129

Many Southerners were already pushing for secession before
October of 1859, but the raid served as an example of abuse toward
the South which provided a good excuse for disunion. Although many
Northerners despised abolitionism, the Southern fear of growing
antislavery feeling was heightened considerably by the Harpers
Ferry raid. Letters poured in to Wise, warning him of the "villany
of Northern abolitionists," and urging him to "bring them all to
trial. . . ."130 Abolitionists fed this fire, also, as
they claimed that "All of us at the North Sympathize with the
Martyr of Harpers Ferry."131 Francis E. Bigelow, a
supporter of Brown, wrote from Worcester, Massachusetts: "If he is
hung it will raise 10,000 John Browns."132 The South
feared this ever so much, but hang him they must, despite the
warning from both North and South that doing so would make a martyr
of the man.

Brown forced the South to retreat from any further accommodation
with the North. He offered Southern secessionists an argument and a
warning. The argument was used by the South to hasten secession:
The raid symbolized the ruthlessness of the North, of abolitionism,
in attacking the cherished institutions of the South; and to
emphasize this argument, the South enlarged the significance of the
raid by punishing its participants harshly and quickly. The warning
raised by the Harpers Ferry raid was the danger of black
insurrection, but this the South whispered fearfully to itself.

CONCLUSION: THE MEANING OF JOHN BROWN'S RAID

The raid organized by John Brown at Harpers Ferry on October 16,
1859, was a pivotal event which pushed the nation closer to civil
war. There is ample proof that John Brown was not a madman, but
rather a dedicated activist who had perhaps more courage, not less
sanity, than other antislavery men and women of his generation.
Specifically, we can conclude that: (1) Brown's life was a
progression of antislavery feeling, beginning with a mild,
educational approach, but later recognizing the necessity of
violence, especially after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the
events in Kansas in which Brown participated. (2) The plan which
Brown developed was well thought out, and many contemporaries, as
well as historians evaluating the. raid later, were confident that
it was a feasible one. The efficacy of guerrilla war has been
proven, and there is considerable feeling from Redpath, Tidd,
DuBois, Stavis, and others that Brown had a good chance of success,
once he got out of Harpers Ferry. It is also not unreasonable that
Brown hoped to save lives by his campaign. Assuming that a frontal
attack on slavery had become necessary, a guerrilla war would
probably have been less bloody than the extended conventional
warfare that took 600,000 lives. (3) The fact that many highly
respected people supported Brown also re-inforces the argument that
his contemporaries saw him, not as mad, but as serious, dedicated,
and capable.

Evidence leads us to believe that John Brown's raid on Harpers
Ferry was a reasonable, though dangerous, act which could have
succeeded. As to the sanity of the initiator of the raid, we have
ample testimony from his friends as to the integrity of John Brown.
But, if a doubt still remains as to his worth or sanity, the words
of an enemy should lay them to rest. Henry Wise had considered the
charges of insanity levelled at Brown, but after the execution, the
Virginia Governor gave his own opinion of the accusation:

They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a
madman. He is a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw; cut and
thrust and bleeding, and in bonds. He is a man of clear head, of
courage, fortitude, and simple ingenuousness. He is cool,
collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say that
he was humane to his prisoners, and he inspired me with great trust
in his integrity as a man of truth.133

The controversy over Brown's sanity and over the significance of
the Harpers Ferry raid stems from a lack of understanding, shared
by our own age as well as Brown's, that a white man might
voluntarily risk his life to free a bunch of miserable slaves. Two
prejudices are operating in this lack of understanding. One is the
prejudice that refuses to admit any legitimacy in a small group of
people challenging an institution which they see as unjust. From
this point of view, had Brown been a captain in the Union Army, he
would have been a hero, but, without the uniform of established
power, his actions against slavery could not be understood. The
second prejudice is composed of racism and elitism, and insists on
evaluating history and human worth from a white perspective and
from the perspective of the well-to-do elements of society. Brown
recognized this prejudice in his fellow man:

Had I interfered in the manner which I admit. . .in
behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called
great, or in behalf of any of their friends. . .and suffered and
sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all
right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act
worthy of reward rather than punishment.134

These words, spoken by John Brown at his arraignment, could be
repeated with relevance by black and white revolutionaries
today.

Notes

1 In this paper, Harpers Ferry will be spelled two different
ways. When quoting nineteenth-century sources the apostrophe will
be retained. In the rest of the text, the modern spelling without
the apostrophe will be used.

4 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American
People (New York, 1965), 601. Morison calls Brown a "madman
with a method."

5 Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John
Brown (Boston, 1891, 7.

6 Autobiography of Owen Brown, ibid., 10. Right up until
his death, Owen Brown was a deeply concerned abolitionist. In 1856,
six weeks before his death, he wrote his son, John, in the Kansas
Territory. Owen had collected newspaper clippings on the Kansas
struggle and offered to send them to John, The elder Brown was
intimately familiar with the problems in Kansas, and he had written
his Congressman, Joshua R. Giddings, asking him to support the
free-state cause. This letter is in Sanborn, 19-20.

7 Stavis, op cit., 14-18.

8 John Brown's Autobiography, in Sanborn, op. cit.,
15.

9 Ibid., 14-15.

10 Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York,
1969), 235.

11 Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass (Hartford, 1881), 137.

21 Letter from John Brown, Jr. to John Brown, in Sanborn, op.
cit., 188-190.

22 James Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown
(Boston 1860), 81.

23 Fredrickson, op. cit., 37-41. Frederick Douglass
recorded the influence he felt from Brown. "From this night spent
with John Brown in 1847, while I continued to write and speak
against slavery, I became less hopeful of its peaceful abolition.
My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this
man's strong impressions. The Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass (Hartford, 1881), 279.

24 DuBois op. cit., 134-144.

25 Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859; A
Biography Fifty Years After (Boston, 1910), 125-152. Richard
Hinton and Franklin Sanborn also published documents which show
that the executed men were involved in the attacks on the
free-staters, and that the Pottawatomie executions were hardly
perpetrated against "innocent people" as Samuel Elliot Morison
claims. See Sanborn, op. cit., 251-259; Richard J. Hinton,
John Brown and His Men: With Some Account of the Roads They
Travelled to Reach Harper's Ferry (New York, 1894, 61-92; and
Morison, op. cit., 591.

26 DuBois, op. cit., 134-144.

27 lbid., 157. After Higginson's visit to Kansas, he reported on
what he had found out about the Pottawatomie executions: "I heard
no one who did not approve of the act and its beneficial efforts
were universally asserted. Governor Robinson himself fully
endorsing it to me and maintaining like the rest, that it had given
an immediate check to the armed aggressions of the Missourians,"
In, Howard N. Meyer, Colonel of the Black Regiment: the Life of
Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York, 1967), 123.

28 Ralph Harlow, Gerrit Smith (New York, 1939),
150-155.

29 DuBois, op. cit., 98.

30 Louis Ruchames, A John Brown Reader (New York, 1959),
221.

31 DuBois, op. cit., 92-100.

32 Ibid., 53-55; and Stephen Oates, To Purge This Land With
Blood (New York, 1970), 46-47.

39 Letter from John Brown to John, Jr. April 15, 1857, in
Ruchames, op. cit., 112-113.

40 Villard, op. cit., 285-286; Hinton, op. cit.,
146-147.

41 Charles Blair in The Mason Report, 121-129.

42 Oates, op. cit., 217.

43 Sanborn, op. cit., 422.

44 Oates, op. cit. 215.

45 Hinton, op. cit., 141-164; Villard, op. cit.,
285-287.

46 lbid., 702. The nine men with Brown at this point were
Charles P. Tidd, Owen Brown, Aaron Stevens, Charles Moffett,
Richard Robertson, Richard Realf, L. F. Parsons, and William
Leeman. Tidd, Owen Brown, Stevens and Leeman were the only ones
from this group that went to Harpers Ferry.

79 Executive Papers of Henry A. Wise, Lawrence Thatcher of
Memphis,Tennessee, to John Brown, October 3, 1859. Thatcher wrote
to Brown that he had been touring the South and had found
considerable antislavery sentiment among the nonslaveholding white
population, especially in Arkansas and Tennessee. He urged Brown to
launch his raid in one of those two states, apparently unaware that
he had already chosen to begin at Harpers Ferry.

80 The Mason Report, 109. Realf was a member of Brown's band at
the Chatham Convention and was designated as Secretary of State
under the Provisional Constitution. He went to the East to keep an
eye on Hugh Forbes, and then went on to England, apparently to
raise money for the raid. He did not return in time to be at
Harpers Ferry, but he did appear before the Mason Committee, Oates,
op. cit., 251 and 359.

99 DuBois, op. cit., 241 and 344; Executive Papers of
Henry A. Wise, Southern Merchant of the City of New York, to Wise,
October 24, 1859. This is one of several letters which Wise
received, urging him to prosecute and hang Northern abolitionists
especially Douglass, for the Harpers Ferry raid.

100 Oates, op. cit., 343.

101 Letter to the Rochester Democrat and American from
Frederick Douglass, postmarked Canada West, October 31, 1839,
printed in Philip Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick
Douglass (New York, 1950) 460-462.

111 Executive Papers of Henry A. Wise: "Wil" to John Brown, from
New York, November 29, 1859; S. C. Sigourney, Boston, to Wise,
December 17, 1859; Merrit Haynes, Massachusetts, to Wise, November
22, 1859; an unsigned letter from Cincinnati Negroes to Wise,
November 19, 1859; Samuel Adams, Boston, to Wise, November 23,
1859; "Boston Freeman," to Wise, November II, 1859; Charles F.
Hill, New York, to Wise, November 8, 1859; J. C. McKie, Boston, to
Wise, November 23, 1859; M. R. Westbrook, Mississippi, to Wise,
November 28, 1859; William Mason, Providence, to Wise, November 12,
1859; Alfred M. Barbour, Harpers Ferry, telegram to Wise, October
26, 1859; George L. Lurnsden, St. Paul, Minnesota, to Wise,
November 12, 1859. Lurnsden was the man who asked to be hanged in
Brown's place.

112 Affadavit of S. M. Goodale, November 17, 1859, from the John
Brown Papers, Library of Congress.

113 The descriptions of the raiders come from the following
sources: Redpath, op. cit., 249-250; DuBois, op. cit.,
280-286; Villard, op. cit., 414-415; Gates, op. cit.,
275- 276; Sanborn, op. cit., 546-547; Hinton, op.
cit., 274-276. DuBois claims two other possible Negro
participants. Jeremiah Anderson, who was killed during the raid, is
believed by DuBois to be a mulatto. He is listed with the Negroes
in all the original reports of the Chatham Convention. John
Anderson, a free Negro from Boston, is not listed in other accounts
of the raid, but DuBois says "whether he arrived and was killed, or
was too late has never been settled." Sanborn also mentions John
Anderson as a 23rd member of the raiding party, but says that it is
uncertain whether he participated or not.

114 Phillips, op. cit., 290.

115 Quarles, op. cit., 240-243; Oates, op. cit.,
354-355; A Tribute of Respect Commemorative of the Worth and
Sacrifice of John Brown of Ossawatomie (Cleveland, 1859);
Letter from Justice Morgan, West Springfield, Massachusetts, to
Wise, December 2, 1859, John Brown Papers, Library of Congress.